Hay Bails and Cheat Notes

Every February, if you are good all month, you get to participate at the months-end Soap Box Derby race. Apparently Griffin felt he need to push the teachers all week with various things such as not following directions, arguing with instructions, eating his pencils. You know. All the good things parent's love to cringe about.

Griffin had been picked to push his class soap box derby race car until the morning of the race. All students were lining up in their classes for pictures with their respective derby car. This morning proved to be nothing out of the norm from the rest of the week. The teacher explained not once, not twice, but THREE times that children were to stop picking out the straw out of the hay bails because these bails were only borrowed and would be going back to the owner soon. The teacher lined up the class for a class picture. As she took the first picture with her digital camera she looked at the shot to see if everyone was lined up. Griffin was immediately removed from pushing his derby car. He cried and cried, not understanding why. So Ms Leonnig showed him her camera. This is why:

About a week later as Griffin and I were practicing his spelling words, I was noticing he was having a hard time differentiating "ou" words and "ow" words (like ground and crown). So I set up words that had 'ow' and we made a sentence: "Now, go through down town, through the crowd, to see the powerful cowboy wearing the crown" It seemed silly but all other words that he was given if they weren't in that sentence then they were "ou" words. I had told him, to heighten the motivation, told him if he made a 100% on the test I'd take him for ice cream. I didn't realize that boyyyy this made him nervous!! 

The next morning I put a little love note in his lunch box. On the back of the note, I told him "remember..." and then included the sentence for him to recite before the test. 

I got an IM message from a friend of mine who happened to be subbing for Ms Leonnig that day. 

"Umm, we had a problem with Griffin this morning. He was caught cheating on his spelling test. He was using a cheat sheet that he said you gave to him. He said you really wanted him to get a 100% so you MUST have put that in there for him to cheat with. He then later admitted that B had talked him into using it to cheat. Never the less, he got a WHOA for it." 

What!? Yes. I put that note in his lunch box for the MAIN purpose of slipping him a cheat sheet. I'm hard core momma at 2nd grade. Can you see it now?